Finally there goes my SP-12 again! I bought this thing on ebay and after it arrived i was thoroughly checking it´s functions for three days. All good and so there was no hesitation on giving 100% positive feedback to the seller. So when the test were done i was working on some beat the other day and out of nothing i couldn't read a thing on the display anymore. The backlight was on, but that was it. Some knocking on the machine helped and i thought it was some soldering point that got lose. First I did not want to get my own hands on the machine, so i brought the SP to some repair dude here in Hannover. Burana works was the place and i gave the guy a written description of the problem. He called me back 2 days later, telling me he did the work i asked him for, but that the display contacts weren't the problem. I picked it right up again and decided that i take a look at it on my own. Opened the machine and there it was: The 14 Pin Cable on the display broke right over some contacts. So i got a friend who was good at soldering to help me and we changed the whole cable. It took us until 4 o'clock in the morning but we were sure having it done. Assembled the machine and guess what: Error! Teh whole machine now froze and the display wasn't working either. After this i was really afraid of having broken the board of the SP and then sent it to Studiorepair in Bad Homburg. I was lucky and Nikolaus Riehm te guy operating studio repair already had an SP-1200 for repairs in his shop so he could cross-check on the machines. After checking both my new display that i ordered from ebay (hard to get these days) and the old one, he assumed that both of them were broke. He then tried one of my displays in the SP-1200 where it worked just fine. After metering the pins on my SP-12 and comparing it to the SP-1200 he found out that the voltage on one of the SP-12 display pins was much higher than on the SP-1200. He tracked back the signal and voila it was the resistor on that circuit whose foot came of from the board. Turned out that this particular resistor was responsible for the dimming and since it didn't dim the voltage the display was working at full glow which made it impossible to see anything. My god was i happy that it wasn't something serious. Niko then fixed my first fader as well which was a little unreliable after all these years (the machine was build Jan. 12th, 1987). So i must say, if you got vintage gear that needs fixing and you are in Germany, talk to this guy, he knows what he does! Cheers Niko! In the video above you´ll find a little beat i just started, sorry for the bad quality, but it was dark and taken with my mobile phone. I´ll upload a audio version while progressing with the track!